From POS to Ecommerce: Addressing the CPG Disparate Data Problem

Have you ever seen a creative product display in a store and thought “That’s a clever promotion!” and wondered what went on behind the scenes that led to that display?Hint: it was probably a collaborative data-driven insights effort between the product manufacturer and the retailer.

Today, consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies need to be more analytically capable than ever before. As retailers rely on brands as sources of insights, growth, and category leadership, CPG companies need to have a full view of not only their business but also the market.

However, the challenge faced by many CPG companies is that they have too much data and not enough insight:

Data sets sit across disparate IT systems and don’t easily link up due to different formats and levels of granularity. While a patchwork of solutions is created across these systems, it is rigid and inefficient, limiting analytic possibilities and tying up precious hours. For example, CPG account teams struggle with matching direct retailer POS data to the shipments data due to each retailer having their own product hierarchies, reporting periods or unique reporting metrics. As a result, account teams find themselves having to manually extract, organize, and consolidate the POS information from their retail accounts every week. This time-consuming affair impedes the account teams from generating useful insights to make category-driving recommendations for their retail customers.

But there is a better way to manage data and derive stronger insights from multiple sets of granular data – all in minutes rather than days. With the right solution, retailer POS data can be easily mapped against a manufacturer’s shipment data without taking all day or forcing either party to change their hierarchies. By being able to quickly access all data sets in one place and leverage tools they already know like Excel, CPG managers can save time and energy otherwise spent on gathering, organizing, and cleansing data. By leveraging the power of data unification – without having to learn to code – CPG companies can get a more complete view of the market, make more strategic business decisions, and drive winning results.

ARE YOU SPENDING MORE TIME MANAGING DATA THAN GENERATING INSIGHTS THAT DRIVE GROWTH?

With an end-to-end solution like the 1010data platform that easily unifies data, CPG business teams can free up time to conduct more analysis, resulting in richer insights for retail partners that can mean the difference between being a trusted category advisor and being just another brand on the shelf.

For a more in-depth look at how unified data can empower your CPG business, check out: